One of the most remarkable legends in the life of St. Francis of Assisi”and one of the most outrageously incredible too”is that of the wolf of Gubbio. This story comes to us from the Fioretti, or Little Flowers of ?St. Francis, a collection of anecdotes written in the fourteenth century. The Francis portrayed in the Little Flowers is a wonder-worker, wholly in control of nature.

At Gubbio, he tames a wolf who was preying not just on livestock but also on human beings. And he does this by reasoning with the beast. Brother Wolf, says Francis, I promise you that I will have the people of this town give you food every day as long as you live, so that you will never again suffer from hunger. After the townsfolk forgive the wolf and agree to uphold their end of the bargain, the wolf seals the deal by extending his paw to Francis, and then spends the rest of his life begging door to door, just like a Franciscan.

Beautiful story. But hard to believe.

You will not find much about Brother Wolf in Augustine Thompsons new biography of St. Francis. As he sees it, this is a tall tale, a fable”a falsehood. And so are most of the miracles ostensibly performed or experienced by St. Francis, including that of the crucifix that spoke to him at the ruined church of San Damiano and set him on the road to sainthood, cluelessly.

As a historian, I have been painfully aware of the gap between fact and legend for a very long time. Year after year, I have laughed out loud along with my students whenever the time came to read and discuss the Fioretti. , and especially whenever we focused on how the wolf extends his paw to St. Francis and seals the deal with a handshake. Yet, as a Catholic and as a devotee of St. Francis, I am irked whenever anyone calls the story into question.

Why? Because the wolf of Gubbio is a perfect Zen koan. The wolfs silence in the presence of St. Francis is the sound of one hand clapping. His nodding and tail-wagging and his pawing bring me face to face with the paradox of belief and with my delight in the seemingly impossible. When I laugh at the story, it is not because I find it ridiculous but because it brings me such joy. This is no mere fable, after all: It is a sacramental poem that encapsulates undeniable truths in inexhaustible layers of meaning.

So what, then, is St. Francis without the wolf of Gubbio? Who is he, then, this most beloved of Catholic saints, whose image can be found in gardens everywhere, even in the very un-Catholic Bible Belt and in the most urbane precincts of suburbia? If St. Francis was not a nature mystic who could talk to birds and strike bargains with Brother Wolf, who or what are we left with?

We are left with the historical Francis, who, much like the historical Jesus, is an empirical construct rather than an object of faith. And this historical Francis, as revealed by Thompson, who teaches history at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, turns out to be a medieval man who painfully stumbled his way to holiness and whose demeanor might have frightened and repelled most of us.

This Francis is not the Christlike miracle-worker of the Fioretti. Instead, he is a man who spent much of his time groping for solutions to situations that he did not expect to encounter. Not, as is typical in hagiography, the immediately perfected saint with a plan from the moment of his conversion, Francis had to react to new, concrete situations; he did not carry out some abstract vision.

Among Thompsons many keen yet painful insights into the historical Francis, one stands out and serves to bind together the entire narrative and to shed light on the discordant history of the Franciscan order: Leadership was an intolerable burden to Francis, spiritually, one he wished to be rid of as quickly as possible.

He was caught in an impossible bind, we find out, because his interpretation of the gospel required him to be less than all others, and subject to them in all things, but his role as founder and leader of a religious order required that he act as their superior. The end result was not just a short-circuiting in Francis himself but also the development of fissures among his followers that would only widen and deepen after his death.

Another insight offered in this biography concerns that most essential of Franciscan traits: poverty. Unlike so many other interpreters of Francis, who have focused on his aversion to property and possessions, the author here shifts the readers attention from a social issue to a theological one: the saints passion for the Eucharist.

As Thompson sees it, Francis was far more taken by eucharistic devotion than by personal or communal acts of self-abnegation. Doing away with belongings and private property was but an outward corollary of a much deeper self-emptying: the total surrender of the divine that was made manifest continually in the Mass and in the consecration of the bread and wine. For Francis, to consume or venerate the Eucharist was to experience the true poverty that was embraced by the Word.

This shift in focus serves to lessen the social context of the historical Francis. Though mention is made of those other poverty-obsessed contemporary movements that were remarkably similar to that of Francis in many respects, namely the Cathars and Waldensians, no links are forged between them and no effort is made by the author to delve into possible connections. In the end, it is as if the similarities between Francis and these kindred spirits were but mere coincidences. Some historians, including this reviewer, would prefer to set the historical Francis in closer proximity to these ragged wandering preachers who despised wealth and committed themselves to absolute self-denial.

The stripped-down, bare-bones historical Francis of this biography is at once immensely likeable and deeply disturbing. He is appealing insofar as Thompson makes him seem much more like an ordinary man who accomplished extraordinary things rather than a heaven-sent, self-assured prophet.

His befuddlement, his inner turmoil, his inability to control events make him seem not just very human but also much like nearly anyone who is likely to pick up this book. This Francis is always searching and struggling, and ever failing to fully commune with others or get things right. Sometimes he is gruff, even ornery. If this is what saints really look like, or where holiness takes you, then maybe there is hope for all of us who endure days where the most we accomplish is washing the dishes.

This historical Francis is disturbing insofar as he suffers too much, apparently without much divine comfort, much like Christ on the cross, bemoaning his abandonment by the Father above. Stripped of the mystical and miraculous, the historical Francis is no jester or holy fool, no trickster figure, no source of joy.

Instead, in Thompsons telling, he is a clueless, passive-aggressive drifter who cannot fully comprehend what he is doing or why he is doing it. He is a very sad saint who evokes pity rather than emulation, and it is difficult to figure out how he could attract as many disciples as he did.

This very scholarly biography, which deserves the highest praise for its painstaking research in of all the relevant primary sources and for its flowing critical dialogue with the best scholarship on St. Francis, does have its spiritual side. It is an uncommon sort of spirituality one finds here, at once brutally honest about the limits of our knowledge yet also oddly optimistic about finding transcendence within those limits. There is no uninterpreted Francis, the author admits. That includes the Francis of this book.

The supernatural does intrude, unlikely as it may seem in a quest for the historical Francis published by a university press. It is a low-key intrusion, but hard to miss, especially when the narrative turns to the final days of the saints life and to the mysterious gift of the stigmata. This biography does take this mystery very seriously, as the final summation of a most extraordinary life. That the wounds on Francis body were not puncture holes but odd nail-like fleshly protrusions is affirmed here, as is the judgment that these were not self-inflicted or psychosomatic mutilations. Yet, miraculous or not, says the author, the stigmata are difficult to square with some natural cause.

While Francis of Assisi is aimed ?at scholars, its engaging narrative, largely uncluttered by references to original texts or scholarly issues and the sorts of digressions scholars love and lay readers tend to loathe, provides an excellent biography for the non-scholar. Anyone who desires to research Francis further, or anyone who wants to encounter the scholarship firsthand, need only turn to this biography, with its dense back section on sources and debates chock-full of bibliographical data.

The biography can best be described as a Rorschach test: There is much to be read into it, much to marvel at, and much to puzzle over. By stripping down St. Francis to his barest self, metaphorically, just as the saint himself did literally when confronted by his father and the bishop of Assisi, we are left with a man who begs for the readers own interpretation, just as the historical Francis and the legendary Brother Wolf once begged door to door.

This is not a Francis who is likely to inspire conversions but may perhaps offer solace to all who have wrestled with the world, the flesh, and the devil. This is a historians Francis, not that of a spiritual director, yet he is not totally stripped of mystery and transcendence.

Thompsons Francis is very human and supremely paradoxical, as much a test of ones own faith as a reminder of the limits of historical research: He is at once heroic and pathetic, commanding and vulnerable, holy and disturbing, very medieval yet oddly contemporary; as unexpected as a Dominican biographer who ignores the long-standing rivalry between his order and that of the saint he so obviously admires.

Carlos Eire is the Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University.

]]>Carlos Eirehttp://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/08/paradoxical-francisWaking Up to Deathhttp://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/10/waking-up-to-death
Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400 In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief by James l. Kugel Free Press, 256 pages, $26

Whether we like it or not, death is a constant point of reference, an unavoidable horizon, a question mark over everything. Everyone, gravedigger or intellectual, atheist or fervent believer, is forced by death to think in some way about realms beyond the visible world.

Diagnosed with an aggressive and incurable case of cancer in the summer of 2000, James Kugel, a preeminent biblical scholar, suddenly found himself confronting ultimate questions”not dispassionately, as he was trained to do, but in the most visceral sense. Given two years to live, perhaps three at most, he felt robbed of the background music he had always taken for granted: the music of infinite time and possibilities . . . now suddenly . . . gone, replaced by nothing , just silence. Along with the silence came also a sense of smallness, an awareness of the ridiculously infinitesimal boundaries of his existence.

As he struggled with chemotherapy”which could only delay his demise”he turned inward, reflecting on the way in which this silence and smallness, and his state of mind, so utterly personal, pointed to some universal truths about the human condition and more specifically to the whole idea of religion. The end result of these reflections was this book, which is a rare combination of personal observation, philosophical rumination, and scholarly expertise, and an attempt to discern what it is that makes it possible”or even necessary”for human beings to have religious beliefs.

This is a remarkably daring text, the sort of book many academics avoid like the plague: a book aimed at a wide reading public, written with the hope that it might actually change the lives of some of its readers. Expertly grounded in the social-scientific study of religion, yet ultimately reliant on subjective existential arguments, it does more than suggest the presence of a higher reality. It actually proposes that such a reality is constantly accessed through religious belief. In the process, Kugel also asserts that the existence of religion is best understood through the limitations of human existence rather than through the order in nature that points toward a Creator.

This is no ordinary argument for the existence of God, though it could easily enough be taken as such by some readers, especially because of its unabashed references to the God of Abraham and Moses and its well-placed quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures. Neither is it a functionalist or reductionist argument for the existence of religion, as one might expect from disciples of Ernst Troeltsch, Claude Levi-Strauss, or Clifford Geertz. At bottom, this book is much closer to existentialist sensibilities than to anything else, and its central argument, stripped to its barest elements, is a defense of the reality of transcendence and its accessibility within the human self.

Valley of the Shadow has a sharp polemical edge and is reminiscent of the apologetics of ages past. Its foil, however, is not some false religion or heresy, but the die-hard materialism that suffuses Western culture, and the reductionism that it leads to concerning religion. This is not to say that Kugel simply dismisses all such approaches to religion.

On the contrary, he finds it useful to ponder an array of reductionist attempts to explain the existence of religion, from that which seeks to pinpoint the area of the human brain or the specific genes connected to religiosity to that which sees religion as a malfunction of the human mind or a vestigial remnant from a primitive stage of human development suitable only for whimpering, immature dullards (a point of view championed by the new atheists). Such approaches reveal much to Kugel about the real foe in our day and age, who is not so much a skeptic as an overconfident fool.

What he opposes most stridently in this book is not religious doubt itself or attempts to understand religion as a human construct or a biological phenomenon, but rather what he sees as a very artificial and incomplete view of human nature and its purpose: the very presumption that religion can be explained away as unnecessary and that such materialistic perspectives could be definitive or anywhere near ultimately satisfactory for beings who are obviously designed to crave so much more than mere birth, death, and extinction.

Argument often verges on lament in this book, especially when Kugel is articulating his opposition to modernity. There is something profoundly weird about the way we in the modern West conceive of ourselves, or rather dont conceive of ourselves, as we shuffle through our days, he says.

But the weirdness of our current worldview is not really what disturbs him the most: Its the fact that we have lost something. As he sees it, even the most primitive African animists are better off than we are, living as they do in a cosmos that includes a spiritual dimension. The animists soul is still vibrant and fundamentally open. Ours has become a strangely stunted and sealed organ. Discerning this crucial difference, and perceiving what has been lost, he insists, is absolutely essential for our well-being.

Kugels voice is not the only one carrying the arguments, for he relies on others constantly, filling the pages with quotations from a wide range of sources. He quotes biblical texts cautiously, even sparingly, with a purposeful restraint and a poets eye. It could be argued that his arresting translations of the Psalms, so judiciously inserted throughout the book, do more to support his arguments than any other authority quoted by him, be it St. Augustine, Boethius, Yehudah ha-Levi, or Wittgenstein.

Refusing to stick with august savants alone, he also sprinkles his text with artistic voices: the songwriter Leonard Cohen, the poets Randall Jarrell and Rainer Maria Rilke, even Vaudevillian Jewish actors from old radio programs. Oddly enough, he does not call upon Blaise Pascal to join his chorus, even though his own book is very similar in tone, content, and purpose to the seventeenth-century apologists Pénsées .

The parallels between Pascals unfinished apologia and Kugels highly polished one are striking, despite the three and a half centuries that separate them. Both have the same foe in mind, more or less, who is more of a pitiable fool than an enemy: the skeptic whose overconfident rational reductionism ultimately fails to take the spiritual dimension into account. Both approach their deconstruction of the foes errors similarly, from an existential perspective, pointing to the finitude and smallness of the human self as the entry point into the higher wisdom offered by the spiritual realm.

Both eloquently defend the reasonableness of religious belief but rely heavily on paradoxical propositions that can best be described as intuitions rather than arguments. In fact, two gems from Pascals Pénsées would make for perfect epigrams with which to begin and end Kugels book: The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me (which sums up his argument about the absolute smallness and silence that circumscribe our existence and lead us to transcendence), and, The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot understand, (which sums up his argument against rational reductionism).

Ultimately, Kugel intends to compel his readers to assess their way of life, and to admit that the dominant materialistic culture in which most of them live has plunged them into a state of confusion and left their souls strangely stunted and cut off from transcendence. The polemical edge of this book is sharpest here, in those pages that highlight the shortcomings of our dominant mind-set, which he sees as simultaneously overconfident and confused, particularly when it comes to the ethical dimension of human existence. We have lost what was most valuable, he warns, that old way of seeing”seeing ourselves and seeing the stark world that is just over there.

The spiritual realm is more stark and substantial than the skeptics can imagine, less polluted by subtle shapes and shades, and therefore also less treacherous and unreliable. Moral relativism has no place in Kugels stark world, which is less of a world than a mind-set: a way of experiencing and living out an all-or-nothing and black-or-white existence in which the difference between right and wrong does not depend on circumstances alone, but rather on an inherent connection to a different reality which is, as he puts it, more powerful and truer than the one we live in every day.

The significance of In the Valley of the Shadow rests not on its ability to convert anyone”an immensely rare quality in any text”but on its eloquent defense of the utter necessity of religious belief. For unbelievers and skeptics, this book should prove a serious challenge. For believers, it should seem a gift and a confirmation of their deepest intuitions.

The mere fact that this book was written in extremis, by a scholar who was staring death in the eye, makes it all the more remarkable and valuable. Add to this the fact that the author was unexpectedly cured of his deadly cancer and that his good doctors could not fully attribute his healing to their science, and what you have is a powerful testimony to the power of faith that not only rings true, but also verges on the miraculous.

Carlos Eire is the Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University.